Microsoft Gains Ground with Skype Acquisition

Michael Phillips

Posted on 5.24.2011

Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype was the company’s largest ever, and while most observers are reserving their final judgments, the move makes sense on a lot of levels. More than 170 million levels, actually, if you consider that Skype’s giant user base essentially now belongs to Microsoft, which will merge Skype’s technology into its own products and theoretically gain those users’ loyalties in the process. That kind of synergy could even extend to Microsoft’s partners, such as Facebook, and their users. Perhaps most important, particularly in light of Google’s new Chrome laptops and their attempt to make Windows operating systems obsolete, Microsoft gained some much-needed Web cred with the purchase of the highly popular Skype.